


Built on hope

by sshysmm



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Aftermath - Chuck Wendig
Genre: Alcohol, Gen, Missing Scene, Rogue One Spoilers, Thinking and drinking, use of public archives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-10-01 11:49:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17243717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sshysmm/pseuds/sshysmm
Summary: "It reads like the punchline of a bad joke: a Rebel intelligence officer and an escaped criminal walk into a war zone…"--Sinjir Rath Velus needs a little push to act during the events of Aftermath: Empire’s End. Mon Mothma mentions the name Bodhi Rook to him in the hope that it will help him feel more at ease as a defector amongst the Rebels.





	Built on hope

**Author's Note:**

> Just backing up things that were only on my tumblr. Originally posted here: https://ienthuse.tumblr.com/post/164253814409/drabble-im-throwing-out-here-to-clear-some-space

_A nail of guilt sticks in Sinjir’s heart. He had literally nothing to do with the destruction of that planet, but even still, when he heard that the Empire had destroyed it, he had weeks of nightmares about it. Millions of people dying…_ [Aftermath: Empire’s End, p. 207]

* * *

Sinjir expects the response he got from the Senator for Ryloth to be a more common one. The lips thinning with a twitch of disgust; the refusal to take his proffered hand; the stony silence as he’s introduced as a heroic new asset to the Republic. But the funny thing is, the Republic’s actually crawling with Imperial defectors. Every cocky pilot seems to have served in the Academy. He’s still not over the realisation that the Empire had been haemorrhaging talent through its fighter-pilot scheme faster than ship losing power through a mynock’s mandibles.

But there was a conscious decision behind those space-jockeys’ actions: they knowingly abused the system, taking what training they could get and then leaving. Sinjir was different. He enforced loyalty. He kept doing it, year after year, even as the truth emerged about Alderaan and Jedha and Scarif: entire planets wasted by Wilhuff Tarkin’s slavery to his own ego. Still Sinjir did his job.

At least until the second Death Star; apparently two planet-killers had been a bridge too far, even for him.

So he’s not really surprised or rattled by the Senator’s cold shoulder. He’d have shrugged it off and claimed another drink from the serving droids. Only this time Mon Mothma had been the one attempting the introduction, and she had bristled visibly on his behalf.

She’d offered a balm he’d never have asked for: “Sinjir. Have you heard of the ensign Bodhi Rook?”

He’d drained his glass and shrugged. Ensigns didn’t get heard of. Of course he didn’t know the name.

But now he’s slumped in a holo cubicle in Hanna City’s public archives, the best part of a bottle of Corellian brandy forgotten at his feet. The projector makes his skin glow a pallid blue, as all the nightmares of years past swim up through the murk at the back of his mind.

Alderaan. His sleep had been pared down by indistinct anxiety: half-imagined shadows revealed themselves to be piles of charred bones; he saw for the first time how stormtrooper masks looked like skulls under harsh fluoros; and he’d flinch at the colour green, thinking of a whole sky igniting under the impassive eye of a spaceship the size of a moon.

Sinjir, as though he no longer has any control over his own limbs, presses the command to replay the audio recording once more.

“Rogue. Rogue One.”

There’s a crackle, then the outraged reply: “There is no Rogue One!”

A third, prim voice: “There is now.”

“Rogue One … pulling away!”

Sinjir lets it play through. Again. Then again. And again.

This is the last recording of Ensign Bodhi Rook’s voice. Sinjir’s still trying to figure out the lightness of it: a nervous flutter wrapped around determination as taut as durasteel cable. He closes his eyes and he can imagine the ensign’s glance at his co-pilot: not looking for approval exactly, more like showing off a newfound resolve.

There are static images of Rook, too: a multi-angle holo released by the Empire when he went awol, showing just his official ID pictures. Nothing about the images makes the loyalty office in Sinjir suspicious: the man has the relaxed, attentive face of a good drone. His hair and beard are tidy and his uniform and goggles are pristine. There’s nothing in his eyes that says _I have my doubts. I’m not comfortable with this. We’re on the wrong side of history_.

But he presses play again: “Rogue One … pulling away!”

He can hear Rook’s mouth ready around a smile. He can hear that’s he’s breathing heavily: excited. Nervous. A man on the edge of a cliff who’s just embraced the fact that a shift in his balance has tipped him over. There’s only one way forward for him now. His voice holds a rebellion against the Rebellion, as he leads a ship full of people to their certain doom.

Sinjir flinches as his mind fills again with a blinding green fire.

This is a bravery that Sinjir thinks he can never understand, though he’s been trying to wrap his mind around it from every conceivable angle. He tries supposing that there must have been a hopeless thirst for vengeance in the two old warriors who escaped Jedha’s destruction. He’s been pigeonholing the Rebel intelligence officer and the commandos known as the Pathfinders as zealots, willing to do anything to bring about the Empire’s defeat. But this is lazy thinking, he knows. It’s years’ worth of Imperial propaganda and it’s still telling him that the only reasons people fought back were because of blind vengeance and because they were dedicated terrorists.

Rook’s voice tells him something different was going on. The holos related to Operation Fracture form part of the puzzle too, only he’s still trying to figure out how.

There’s a woman who’s a worn-down blade, flinging herself towards him in images recorded by her rescuers’ bodycams: her fury is palpable through the recording, and Sinjir likes to think it’s because he’s drunk that he flinches when she swings a spade through the air at head-height. But she’s also there in the recording of the council meeting, her voice tremulous but as stubborn as Rook’s as she urges them to act. Sinjir thinks Rook may even be standing beside her, though he can’t see the pilot’s face.

She’s the daughter of a man whose memory is derided within the Empire: their greatest traitor until Darth Vader allegedly killed his own master. The man who apparently gave Rook the nudge he needed to set in motion the events Sinjir is watching.

Sinjir watches the reports by General Draven; the obituaries recorded by Mon Mothma. They don’t mention bloodlust or vengeance or extremist Rebels. They tell a fragmentary story of people drawn together over a matter of days. Stewing in these tales, Sinjir almost feels like he could reach out and shake the people they describe, demanding that they explain to him how — _why_ — they were able to do what they did.

First, a nobody defects from the Empire. The Rebels give this great weight, and send a man to track down the nobody: a loyal, experienced intelligence officer, accompanied by his partner, a reprogrammed security droid (Sinjir has to read that a few times. He didn’t think those things could be reprogrammed). With them is the woman, Jyn Erso, daughter of Galen (a name Sinjir was once authorised to break bones for if he heard it uttered in admiration). She’s meant to be nothing but a key that will allow them to access the information carried by Rook, the defector. She’s a street criminal, half-broken by an Imperial labour camp.

But their party grows. They escape Jedha as it suffers its death throes, now accompanied by the defector, Rook, and two old men, who seem to be acolytes of the Force. It reads like the punchline of a bad joke: _a Rebel intelligence officer and an escaped criminal walk into a war zone…_

And then Sinjir can’t listen to the next recording more than once. It ruthlessly undermines his assumption about the Rebel officer’s zealotry: he hears everything in the man’s pause when his orders are confirmed. He’s to kill Galen Erso. Sinjir knows with a leaden certainty that Galen Erso’s daughter and Galen Erso’s confidante and messenger knew nothing of this.

Now, Sinjir chooses to remember the brandy. He takes a long, refreshing swig and scrunches his eyes shut when the report slices in another recording: the officer’s voice, struggling against a background of heavy rain and the screaming of fighter engines. He tries to call off the strike on Galen Erso’s research facility. The strike is already happening and it cannot be stopped.

And then they’re all back at the Rebel Base: the ‘debriefs’ of the two old Jedhans give off nothing but the perplexity of those interviewing them. One speaks in sardonic platitudes and the other leaves behind little more than a cynical grumble. They have a purpose, and they don’t much care what Rebel intelligence thinks of it. Still, Sinjir feels goosebumps crawl up the back of his neck when the holo focuses on the blank blue eyes of Chirrut Ȋmwe as he describes what he felt when his home was turned inside out by the Death Star’s laser. Sinjir feels like perhaps he deserved to suffer even worse nightmares than those he’d had in the wake of Alderaan.

Rook’s debrief holds Sinjir’s attention for longer. He wears a tattered, stained Imperial jumpsuit. The questions he’s asked are clipped and rushed, squeezed between Rook’s unexpected arrival and the coming council session he’s to attend. The haste rattles the pilot, who frowns and shakes his head unhelpfully. His hair is now coming loose in strands, and his eyes are glassy and wide; he cannot answer when he’s asked what Saw Gerrera did to him on Jedha. But there’s impatience in Rook’s silence now: Sinjir wonders at the idiots who didn’t anticipate the departure of Rogue One. Bodhi Rook’s jaw tightens and he mentions the name of Galen Erso again: “ _he_ said I could make it right. That’s why I’m here. Don’t you understand? Time is running out!”

Sinjir glugs from the brandy bottle again. He was never really with the Rebellion, just this fledgling New Republic. He’s not really got any idea of what it takes to be the little guy standing up to a galactic threat. But he keeps searching for clues in Bodhi Rook’s liquid dark eyes. In the hoarse exhaustion of the intelligence officer’s voice as he accepts his orders, and in the way Jyn Erso’s body trembles as she tries to force out words that will make the council understand the danger they face. Whatever it is, it’s also there in the simple directness of the guardians’ debriefings.

“Rogue One … pulling away!” the desperation in Rook’s voice is gone by then. He’s locked into a course of action that will see him die on Scarif, under the same deathly aurora that ended his homeworld. Not enough to save Alderaan. But enough to save countless other planets.

It’s enough. Sinjir supposes. That’s what they’d all decided: together, they would be enough, because they had to be.

He thinks of Temmin’s sulky expression whenever he comes up against some political hurdle to leaving Chandrilla. He thinks of Norra and Jas, stuck somewhere on Jakku below the entire remnant of the Imperial fleet. It’s not a Death Star, but it might as well be to those in a small, Corellian freighter.

And that decides it. However it goes, Sinjir and Temmin and whoever’s willing to join them will just have to be enough. They can end the Empire now, and they must. The galaxy will be paying back the actions of Rogue One for a long time to come, but the destruction of the last Imperial warships will go a fair way towards clearing that debt. Towards recognising what Bodhi Rook’s defection set in motion all those years ago.

Sinjir stands and empties the bottle of brandy. He flicks off the holoprojector. He can almost feel the ghosts of those five people jostle around him, urging him on to do something stupid and right for once.

He marches from the archives with a newfound sense of purpose.

 


End file.
